Wikipedia Sucks!

https://www.metafilter.com/175741/Quick ... ender-bias

As usual, the Metafilteroids had "opinions". Usually stupid ones.

Wikipedia rules are pretty well laid out.

Still no comment on how Metafilter's founder and moderators ganged up and wrote their own Wikipedia bios.

As I said on this subject recently, it falls to others to take a systemic approach to filling in the gaps, the Wikipedians have only ever worked on it the way that always work, by blindly guessing.

https://www.wired.com/story/using-artif ... r-problem/

Quicksilver is a spinoff from tools and data that Primer uses to serve clients including US intelligence agencies and large finance companies.

Wikipedia’s notoriously punctilious community will likely keep a close eye on content generated with Quicksilver’s help.

Eh? History has shown they have no such record of due diligence, and you typically learn about these issues when someone suddenly shrieks 'holy shit, this person has done this bad thing fifty billion times and I only noticed by accident, what shall we do now?' The result usually being a mass fight between those who want to blow it all up, and those who want to fix it all.

One question is whether this tool aimed at fixing blind spots has any blind spots of its own. Wade has already noticed that the tool’s suggestions seem skewed towards Americans, echoing a shortcoming of Wikipedia itself. “We need to be super careful that we’re not passing on whatever biases are in that machine-learning system,” says Wade.

Naturally, no details were given as to what, specifically, editors like Wade are authorised to do, to somehow workaround the inherent biases in the reliable sources Wikipedia treats as sacrosanct. Other than tilting the table at AfD, of course.

You know that problem where Wikipedians get addicted to churning out articles just to win their silly internal contests, and don't stop even after being blocked for whatever reason, which then causes a classic Wikipedia battle between those who take the view 'banned means banned' and thus want all their creations erased whenever they are discovered to deprive them of their dopamine hit, and those who prefer to turn a blind eye to the creation of good content regardless of its source, even if created by block evading editors. That well known problem. (seriously, while the rest of the world could give a fuck, this is one of those things that has for years been a source of deep division among these losers).

Well, it seems Quicksilver's ability to identify and even generate missing articles, has turned that problem up to 11. Not only does it mean you can create a bucket load more articles before you are discovered, their nature as desirable articles on missing women means a ton of editors are keen to swoop in and edit them further, without caring where they came from, which throws a spanner in the works because Wikipedia bureaucracy means you can only delete articles created by block evading users quickly, if nobody else has made any substantive edits, otherwise you have to debate each one for seven days.

The person currently doing this is Slowking4, via his sock Warren5th, but there will be plenty of other dope addicts who will like the look of this new way to win, and of course more Slowking socks.

https://xtools.wmflabs.org/pages/en.wik ... ren5th/all

At 22 articles in two weeks he was actually quite slow, but I guess not being too fast is part of the game.

The Wikipedians are struggling to find a way forward, so let me remind them that current position (which I documented in here somewhere) is that you have to undo all their contributions, and reapply them in your own name, if you want to keep them (whereby accepting all liability for any errors). Not an official policy, just the uneasy truce at the moment.

The crazy thing is, there are Wikipedians prepared to do this, happy to recreate articles under their own name that were generated by a machine and first published on Wikipedia by a crack addict. You would think people should be alarmed that one of them is Ser Amantio di Nicolao, whose claim to fame is being the most prolific article creator in Wikipedia history, who also lives in his mom's basement. But no, they're all cool with it.

At the end of the day, questions have to be asked. Is the number of women covered by Wikipedia going up (slowly) because basement dwelling dopamine addicts got their hands on some knock off NSA software, or because concerned citizens with encyclopedia writing skills have put their backs into a collective effort to redress the balance? And if the answer is a bit of both, is there a gender divide there two, men being the former, women being the latter? And more importantly, when will the two groups start fighting for resources and credit?

Post contains swearing and ranting throughout.


Currently, for no good reason, wikipedia defines the way to combat this systemic gender bias as creating more articles about women.

Wikipedia is terrible at this. I mean I have done my bit, which was to create a few (hundred) articles about important women from all over the world, as was stated in the to do guide on their shiny project. Net Result? Fuck all, because all the articles were deleted without discussion per G5.

Lets see what else they achieved... oh yes, how about driving Dr. Blofeld off the project? Guy creates 96,000 articles, mostly about women. Give him a reward? Nope! Accuse him of being a worthless copyright violator, drag him through AN/I till he quits. Do the same to anyone else who likes to make articles, like elsa.rolle and whatisname. Names are not important here and listing them all is a waste of time. Point is that Wikipedia has systemically driven away anyone that cares about making articles.

Just like Wikipedia drove away anyone that cared about editing articles, anyone that cared about fixing errors, and really drives away anyone who has a brain.

Morons then do all this publicity about their "issues of systemic bias", well yes I see the fucking bias, and yes it is damn well systemic. And nope this little AI toy will not bloody well fix the problem caused by complete and utter incompetence and project mismanagement.

And what about women, well lets find a women who has edited Wikipedia. For example, my sister. Who was banned and then globally locked for having used my IP address one time. Then later globally locked again while editing on a completely different project, under her own username, using a completely different IP to me. Result. Utter fail. (but oddly not a lost editor, as she returned with a third account and didn't get blocked because proxy.) Hardly a high output editor though, having not created any new articles at all with any of her accounts.

Why? Well just maybe it's because she has better things to do that play politics on Wikipedia, maybe what I find to be a fascinating way to waste a few hours of day with instead of playing CoD or something is just not appealing? Has nobody at Wikimedia considered that their editors are mostly kids, bored students or retired teachers?

And why are the WMF so obsessed with Africa this year? Don't they know that practically no African topic meets the notability guideline? Is it maybe that they haven't read their own ~23,500 page moronic rulebook? I feel the answer here is that the WMF don't have a fucking clue, or if they do they are just hoping the donors don't know and won't find out till they have parted with their cash.

But then with the rise of these corporate rip-offs like Wikia and Everipedia and Co, why does Wikipedia even still have these rules oh so carefully crafted to maintain a pro-male, pro-western, pro-establishment bias? They have completely lost touch with the wiki ethos. It's fucking criminal.

Wikia should not exist, its basically Jimbo trying to monetise Wikipedia by establishing a rule that sends editors to his money making site. And It worked! Everipedia is a direct result of Wikipedia having no room for companies, because they are oh so big on stopping promotional articles and they must bloody well stop any dastardly paid editors, who are clearly fucking evil. Everipedia should not exist either as wikipedia should have accommodated for it's niche. Wikipedia is shedding editors and shedding brand loyalty and very soon it will be in the internet dustbin along with Geocites, AOL, Yahoo, and Bomis.

Wikipedia is touted as the free open web, but it's little more than a dusty library run by incompetent cultists with a penchant for sadism. Or maybe it's escaped everyone's attention that despite having tens of thousands of pages of rules, there is no policy on cyberbullying? Maybe this is because it's not against the rules? We wonder...

In short, are the WMF just completely up their own ass? Answer: damn right they are.


This post is a parody and should not be taken as indicative of how wikipedia operates. The real thing is much worse.

Can't disagree, but the obsession with the WMF is misplaced. Believe it or not, they know a lot, way more than the volunteers. They know who edits Wikipedia and why, and crucially, why not. They're just not in a position to effect change. Not when, by design, change to policy and culture comes from editors. The reason they're fixated on creating more women bios, or rather helping to promote the fact this is happening and running events to do it, is because they know it is the most effective thing they can do, within the constraints of their operations. Three things stop women editors, lack of time, lack of confidence and the toxic culture. Outside of extremely inefficient RL events and pumping out bullshit PR, the WMF has little to no chance of effecting any of those things, because they are so bound up in the community.

CrowsNest wrote:Can't disagree, but the obsession with the WMF is misplaced. Believe it or not, they know a lot, way more than the volunteers. They know who edits Wikipedia and why, and crucially, why not. They're just not in a position to effect change. Not when, by design, change to policy and culture comes from editors. The reason they're fixated on creating more women bios, or rather helping to promote the fact this is happening and running events to do it, is because they know it is the most effective thing they can do, within the constraints of their operations. Three things stop women editors, lack of time, lack of confidence and the toxic culture. Outside of extremely inefficient RL events and pumping out bullshit PR, the WMF has little to no chance of effecting any of those things, because they are so bound up in the community.

The WMF is a body dedicated to its own perpetuation, like most corporate bodies. To do that it needs money, and to raise money it needs to put on a credible show of doing what the donors think they want. It doesn't want to get involved in actually writing the content because that's expensive and opens them up to S.230 liability. While there are enough volunteers to make a plausible show, that's good enough. They don't care whether there are enough volunteers to write and maintain the projects, or whether enough of them are women, or whether they have an agreeable and productive working environment -- they are addicts, and the WMF is their supplier, they know they'll keep coming -- what the WMF has to do is to make a lot of noise about how it wants to do all those correct things to keep the donors happy, They don't care in the slightest whether they have a chance of doing any of those things, and indeed they don't really want to, because then they would have nothing to make a song and dance about. About 10% of the money they raise goes on keeping the servers running, a clear necessity and which they manage to do if somewhat wastefully, and running their own fundraising campaigns, at which they are extremely professional: if there's anything they know, it's how to present themselves to big American foundations and small users. A lot is frittered away on incompetent software projects, and on small grants to social projects designed to keep the volunteers happy while they work at their own expense. Some goes on cheap but well-publicised projects that are vaguely progressive and support their own members and former members while racking up brownie points with the donors -- Africa is this year's way of doing that. They are building up an endowment that will relieve them from the obligation to raise funds from donors or indeed to do anything very much. Then they'll be able to concentrate on doing what the WMF really like, which is to dish out large sums to themselves for their modish political projects.

Lila Tretikov mistakenly thought the object was to run an effcient and effective software house to support the dissemination of the knowledge that the volunteers were so kindly providing. She even thought that the WMF employees should work for their pay and be good at their work. Turns out she was wrong. The future of WMF is Katherine Maher, former communications chief, now ED. Presentation is all.

As noted by the highly controversial decision to add "advocacy" to the organisation's key purposes.

Who profits more if Wikipedia actually fixes the problems the world has identified? The answer, pretty obviously, is the WMF. An inclusive, comprehensive, never wrong, entirely neutral, free encyclopedia? That would be gold dust to them. A license to print money. Forget donors, they'd be having people pay them to be users/partners, people like Facebook.

Editors, or rather those who are still there, couldn't give a monkey's nuts about most of the things the WMF is trying to fix. That's why we can literally name the handful doing it. Editors only ever ask, no demand, that the WMF fix things that makes their hobby more rewarding. But they're no good at defining what they want, or compromising, and that is as much to blame for the poor software and misguided initiatives, as it is the quality of the coders/staff.

Most of the software used by Wikipedia is open source, and their interface is open to anyone who wants to run a useful task, so it's always been a bit of a joke to blame the WMF for the shortcomings of what they produce. The volunteers who sign up to this cult, are simply not clear enough in their goals, not good enough at working together, and not good enough at time management, to be of much use.

The only people who win by the continuing farce of donors being bilked of money based on false promises and shiny PR, is the remaining volunteer editors/coders. Because if it weren't for that continuing effort to deceive the world into thinking Wikipedia is still a worthwhile thing, they'd have no hobby. In many cases, no reason to get up at all.

The WMF will be absolutely thrilled that this tool has been written by proper coders to fix an actual problem. Not the whole problem, but one which they can fix. Assuming they have every intention of being long term partners. The editors, not so much. The editors show their gratitude by doing what they always do - not a word of thanks, just greedily grabbing and using it, the only outcome then being a long list of complaints.....

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... =854509324

Look at this numbnuts......

It almost looks like the Primer team didn't pay attention to the academic notability guidelines, relying instead on Big Data to figure out what "notability" means in practice. This is an intriguing idea from one perspective, but it might be suboptimal for actually finding new subjects for articles. Why not just make a list of every woman who holds a named chair, is or has been editor-in-chief of a journal, or has an h-index over 20? Articles created from that list would stand a much better chance of surviving the process here than those from a list made by sifting random news sources. XOR'easter (talk) 17:24, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

Here's an idea. Do it yourself. Or did that not occur to you, as a member of a volunteer collaboration looking to build a knowledge database?

CrowsNest wrote:[...]

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... =854509324

Look at this numbnuts......

It almost looks like the Primer team didn't pay attention to the academic notability guidelines, relying instead on Big Data to figure out what "notability" means in practice. This is an intriguing idea from one perspective, but it might be suboptimal for actually finding new subjects for articles. Why not just make a list of every woman who holds a named chair, is or has been editor-in-chief of a journal, or has an h-index over 20? Articles created from that list would stand a much better chance of surviving the process here than those from a list made by sifting random news sources. XOR'easter (talk) 17:24, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

Here's an idea. Do it yourself. Or did that not occur to you, as a member of a volunteer collaboration looking to build a knowledge database?

The trouble with this is:

No one has a list of all named chairs and everyone is too lazy to make one.
Google is yet to publish a comprehensible API to get h-index data into meaningful formats.
No one has a list of all Journal editor-in-chief's. In fact it's arguable if they have even finished listing the journals yet.

Thus, due to laziness and lack of motivation, coupled with the fact that this fantastic idea is rooted in a fantasy world where big data works as advertised, this will probably never happen.

That boils down to excusing them for not making a decent encyclopedia because it takes time and effort. No skill or education, just mindless grunt work. And they can't even manage to do that, the very thing they were put on this Earth for.